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At the Kennedy Center, Schmigadoon! Briefly Reappears Through the Mist
Still sweetly spoofing classic Broadway, albeit with a little less bite than on TV.
Josh surveys the peppy song-and-dance sequence with the wary expression of a man confronted by a flash mob at a funeral; Melissa, a lifelong musical theater-vore, thinks, initially, wishfully, that they’ve wandered into a Colonial Williamsburg historical reenactment before surrendering to the saccharine spell. Mildred Layton (Emily Skinner), the town’s self-appointed gatekeeper (“I make sure we all feel shame!” is one of her great lines) and de facto head of the “concerned citizens” group Mothers Against the Future, has a scorcher of a solo in the rapid-fire “Tribulation,” a straight-up channeling of The Music Man ’s “Ya Got Trouble.” The lyrics, which career from complaints about “peanut shells in the street” to “hooch-happy sinners” to “billiard parlors and painted ladies,” could have been typeset into a sanctimonious letter to the editor in The Schmigazette. When Keegan-Michael Key’s character says to Emma, “So she’s got a problem with you, too … Yeah, that lines up,” there’s a flash in her anthracite eyes, as if he’s picked at a scab she never knew she had; no such tête-à-tête transpires in the Kennedy Center version (which, unlike the show, keeps the schoolroom set sparse, with no Abraham Lincoln portrait).
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